An inadvertent chat between public affairs staffers for the Department of Justice and a House committee has exposed a daily happening in the nation’s capital that is rarely openly discussed.
Coordinating release of important documents and statements by communications strategists for executive branch departments and the congressional committees that oversee them is not unusual.
But it’s hard to recall a previous instance when such coordination was pushed as prominently into the national news media.
The present case began on Sept. 5, when Brian Fallon of DOJ’s public affairs office telephoned the Republican communications staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, thinking he had instead dialed staffers with the panel’s Democratic minority.
Fallon “asked if the committee would release committee documents to the media so the department could publicly comment on the material,” according to committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., in a Sept. 8 letter to Attorney General Eric Holder.
The documents concerned Andrew Strelka, a former DOJ lawyer who worked for Lois Lerner at IRS during the initial stages of the tax agency’s illegal targeting and harassment of Tea Party and conservative non-profit applicants.
Issa said Fallon told the committee’s communications staffer that DOJ wanted “to get the material in the hands of interested reporters so the department could comment on it ‘before the majority’ could share it.”
After Fallon realized he was talking with the majority staff rather than the minority staff, Issa said a “circuitous monologue” ensued in which Fallon claimed he called “to improve OPA’s working relationship with the committee’s communications team.”
Nothing came of the conversation in the way of an improved relationship after the conversation concluded, but Issa made public Tuesday his letter to Holder about the incident.
“In this day and age, emails and other electronic communications are sometimes erroneously shared,” Issa said in the letter.
“I am nonetheless disturbed to receive confirmation through this incident of apparently longstanding collaboration between the Obama administration and Ranking Member Cummings staff to obfuscate and prejudice the committee’s work through under-the-table coordination.”
Maryland Democrat Rep. Elijah Cummings is the committee’s ranking minority member.
Issa added that “this highly partisan and combative approach to oversight by the department shows a disregard for the independent investigatory prerogatives of Congress and a deliberate attempt to influence the course of a congressional investigation.”
Fallon confirmed to the Washington Examiner that he made the telephone call to which Issa referred, but denied there was anything untoward about the episode.
“There is nothing inappropriate about department staff having conversations with both the majority and minority staff as they prepare responses to formal inquiries,” Fallon said. “That includes conversations between the spokespeople for the department and the committee.”
A spokesman for Cummings did not respond to an Examiner email requesting comment.
Frederick Hill, deputy director of the Issa panel’s communications staff, said “during the Bush administration, when Henry Waxman chaired the oversight committee, officials were often unwilling to even discuss investigations with Republican minority staff when Democratic majority staff were not also present.”
Waxman, D-Calif., was chairman of the oversight committee from 2007-09.
UPDATE: Democratic staffer responds
A Democratic staffer with the oversight committee provided this statement regarding the telephone call:
“Oversight Committee Democrats make their own independent decisions about when to release information to the public and do not improperly coordinate with any executive branch agency.
“In this case, no one at the Justice Department – including the press office – asked Democrats to improperly disclose any documents, and in fact no documents were disclosed.
“If Chairman Issa’s account is accurate, this sounds like a dumb request from a Justice Department press staffer that Democrats never received.
“If Democrats believe disclosing documents will better inform the public, they will make those decisions on the merits, and there is no restriction on them doing so, just as there is no restriction on the chairman doing so.”
Mark Tapscott is executive editor of the Washington Examiner.
